Yesterday I talked about the BoF on continuous integration. Also on Thursday 29th I will be coordinating another BoF on developing software for enterprises with Gnome (10:00-11:00 in the Sala d’Actes).
By “software for enterprises” here we refer to ERP-like software.
From Wikipedia: Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a single unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a single, unified database to store data for the various system modules.
This vertical software can be more or less complex, but it has normally quite a lot of diferences with most of the horizontal desktop applications. It is database-oriented and sometimes needs complex three-tier architectures and is deployed using several machines.
There are some projects related to Gnome (and using Gnome core technologies) that in some way have the business management software as one of their targets:
- Glom: fast development of database oriented applications with a simple architecture.
- Gazpacho: was born to make the development of business applications GUI easier.
- Kiwi / Stoq: framework for creating GUI applications and example business oriented software using it.
- Fisterra: a development framework for creating complex three tier business software using Gnome without needing to reinvent the wheel.
- Other proprietary or non published developments of business software using Gnome.
They follow different approaches but all of them try to make easier the development of business applications using Gnome technologies.
In the BoF, some of the main discussion topics could be:
- Is there anything in GNOME that could be improved in order to make it more friendly for the development of this kind of applications?
- Which are the different approaches for solving the need of that kind of software, and which are the advantages or disadvantages of each of them?
- Should GNOME as a project provide the third party developers with recommendations on how to use the development framework for data oriented applications?
- Should the business management software projects be part of the GNOME project itself or they should be better outside it and leave it as a very desktop oriented project?
- Would it make sense to have a Gnome-BusinessManagementSoftware kind of working group with the usual mailing list, web page,and working agenda?
- And any other topic that the people attending could find interesting.
If you are interested in Gnome not only as a desktop but also as a way of making better (potentially complex) data-oriented applications, you should participate in this BoF 🙂
I will be flying to Barcelona in a few hours, see you at Guadec!